Commuting Problems

On recent region maps I noticed the southeast corner of Konradshohe wasn't too developed even though it should be a big job center. So I jumped in to take a look.

There was a lot of pollution from the industry I'd put in at the start. I figured that was impeding development, so I bulldozed all the dirty industry. I figured with my extremely negative ID demand it wouldn't come back but it did to some extent so I had to keep bulldozing for a while.

The area still didn't develop so I took a look at commuters. I figured the single bridge from west Konradshohe would be a big bottleneck. Sure enough, it was totally full. I put in a subway just from one end of the bridge to the other and both stations were immediately full. I extended the subway to a stop on the avenida at the edge of the all-residential zone and then another in the avenida in the middle of the residential zone and they were immediately packed too.

Now my commercial areas developed some. My population went up from 95,000 to 105,000 as well

However, I though it should be more than that. Looking through the city, I found lots of partly-filled commercial buildings. Konradshohe is currently resident-heavy, so I wondered were the residently were going to work. Poking around I found the answer - a ridiculously overcrowded connection to Tegel, with 7500 commuters.

Tegel only has about 5000 jobs. This might be because Tegel is behind in time, plus it has a job excess. I decided to push up its residents to see if I could push those commuters back.

Shifting over to Tegel, I added some people but there were still a ridiculous number of people coming in from Shonwald-Glien. They were leaving out to the north to create a classic infinite commuter loop

I cut that and they switched to the train. So I cut the train connection (temporarily, I hoped). Then the lost commuters proceeded to cross half the tile, mostly on rural streets made badly overcrowded by their own presence, to exit another highway to the north. At this point I gave up, decided "if you can't beat them, join them. I organized the route they took and put commercial along the new route. I put in a lot of medium commercial.

And still they headed out. The commuter chain passed within 1 square of buildings downgraded for lack of workers on their overcrowded commute across town to their nonexistent jobs. Since they wouldn't take the jobs, I grew Tegel to over 50,000 to fill the jobs I added. Finally I cut all exits for the commuters. That cut them back by about half, which would be more reasonable. But back in Konradshohe, there are still 7500 workers heading out. I suppose Tegel may end up the commercial center rather than the east bank of Schonwalde-Glien and Konradshohe. Anyway, here's a shot of the region at the end.

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Well, there are a few things I would suggest to fix the development problems and the commuter problems you're having.

The first is there are no major thruways. You have small roads that can only handle a certain capacity. You need to upgrade these to one ways and avenues to increase the capacity of commuters on the streets and this will ultimately increase the capacity of commerce and population your region can hold. In addition to this, are the roads connecting your residential areas to your commercial areas adequately? Most cities have highways connecting the suburbs from the central business districts. You don't appear to have any of that. What seems to be going on is you have your roads placed at random. You can really see this in your second to last picture--roads are dead ending and turning all over the place, its not conducive to a smooth flowing traffic pattern for your region.

PM me and I can give you some more tips, I love planning roads for my cities. I am a regional planner in real life, so its one of my specialties.

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The doubled streets were originally to allow in-street mass transit. I've since added the road top transit mode so I don't need them for that (well, not often- RTM stops do have a few quirks with road access) but I'm not ripping up the ones I have and sometimes I still build more as I has a variety of things to do with the medians.

Generally my roads are fine for my current density. I actually have little trouble with traffic. Actually, I could probably use more traffic for commercial development. The mess of roads in the last picture was an attempt to stop the commuters from another town from crossing the tile to exit other routes out which actually didn't lead anywhere. It was not adequate - the thousands of commuters cheerfully plowed right through the mess to get on an avenida going out.

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